How does a company which started its life making newspapers and magazines more than 30 years ago shape up in 2022?
For one, it helps we’ve a culture of innovation, being one of the first UK companies to use new computers called Macs in 1989, being THE first agency to send a jpeg from a laptop to a national newspaper DOWN THE TELEPHONE LINE in 1993 (I’ve got the Press Gazette cutting to prove it), pioneering the transmission of pdfs to print in the mid-nineties and introducing magical augmented reality to a waiting world in 2011.
Since the pandemic seriously impacted our customer base, just introducing new tech has not been quite enough. We needed to launch new products and new services with measurable impacts for existing and new customers.
Sure we’ve innovated and improved: we saw lockdown as an opportunity to replace all our old hardware and shift to completely new production software. We even “recruited” a new drone so our pix and video could really lift off.
But the real transformation lay in creativity, and not just in writing fascinating copy, taking great pix or cutting snappy videos. In 2020 we accelerated our journey to think, act and deliver like CreaTech leaders. That means using all our creative skills, business savvy and understanding of innovation, to stretch technology to do very special things for our customers.
Two examples:
• Giving 25,000 technicians worldwide the top tips and risk warnings on how to do their jobs… straight to their mobile devices. It saved a household name customer hundreds of thousands of pounds – maybe millions – by preventing damage to expensive components. We also monitor and record every technician’s performance, in real time, and present to the customer in a BI dashboard.
• We don’t make games, but we used gaming tech to model a digital showroom for the world-leading manufacturer of electric and hydrogen powered buses, exposing and explaining the drive train elements which make them the greenest vehicles on the planet, promoting market-leading sustainable technology at one of the world’s biggest industry trade shows. That made a big splash.
Please remember that word: CreaTech. i-creation is part of an exciting CreaTech cluster of local companies, all with an international reach. Soon we’ll launch an inventory of members and services, and a manifesto to place CreaTech centre stage in leading thinking and making things happen to shape a future delivering growth, training, development and employment in our city and surrounding areas.
And that, dear reader, seems an exciting place to leave this blog. Please watch this space. If we’ve done this lot through two years of the pandemic, just think where we could be in 2024.
(By the way, in the great circle of life, i-creation still makes great magazines and newspapers.)
https://www.i-creation.co.uk/